Well, I apologize for the long silence in posting, but Anya and I were on vacation last week. We took another dive trip down to Cozumel, Mexico. We go diving with the group we got certified with - Divehards International. This is the second time to Cozumel, and both times we stayed at Hotel Cozumel & Resort and dove locally there with Dive Paradise.

This year, I rented a Sealife DC800 (8 MP) camera and strobe. I have a deal worked out with Divehards International to be purchasing a DC1000 (10 MP) camera and strobe and wide-angle lens kit here shortly. So I will have a dedicated underwater camera that I own since it doesn't look like I will be affording the housing, strobe and arm, and dome port I need to take my 7D underwater (unless someone wants to make a sizable donation) because we're trying to save up for our next dive trip which will hopefully be Wakatobi Restor in the Southeast Sulawesi Sea in Indonesia!

Anyway - back to Cozumel... The majority of the photos from last week did not turn out that great. I think a lot of these will need to be run through Photoshop (once I can figure out the necessary set of adjustments to make). We had some very weird currents while diving last week, so I ended up not being as close to the corals as I would have liked for many shots, and that combined with rookie work with the strobes really made for sub par photos.

So I won't be critiquing these photos, but I'll share some of the most decent ones as well as sharing some dive stories along with them over the next couple days.

I'll start with some photos from our first dive of the week. When we arrived on Saturday, basically the first thing we did was check into the hotel and head for the water to do a check-out dive to get our boyancy figured out and get into the groove of things. Anya and I probably spent 40 minutes or so in the water and I took several shots including this one of this puffer fish.

Check out how awesome his eye looks! Unfortunately, it was the last photo all week that turned out nice. About midway through the dive, we stumbled into a field of sea stars that were really cool looking. Some of them were at least 14 inches across, and they were yellow with red or black spikes along them (it was tough to tell the color of the spikes, especially since the red spectrum is the first to go away underwater).

See the bluish color cast to the photo? Get used to it, because that's what is wrong with every other underwater photo I took last week. I am not sure if it was the flash intensity, the flash direction, the flash in general, or whatever other factor could be coming into play, but it is one I definitely will need to sort out before taking too many photos in Indonesia.

Stay tuned for more photos from the trip, and some fun dive stories!

- Bill